It must be tempting to try to bump up the emissions from meat if you’re a vegan making an anti-meat argument, because the real numbers won’t help you. A New Yorker journalist made this same claim a while back and his argument was successfully challenged by Frank Mitloehner, UC Davis Professor & CE Air Quality Specialist. George is not the first person to try this sort of trick. Imagine how different the numbers would look if he had bothered to calculate the carbon footprint of all the resources that might have been saved if that plane had never been built and the oil used to fly it had never been drilled for? This is like comparing apples to basketballs. But he has not done the same for the transatlantic flight to which he’s comparing the 4 kilos of meat. George has taken the GHG emissions from livestock and added the emissions that might be saved if the land was used differently. But let’s be clear about what’s actually going on here. Many viewers will have been so struck by the stunning so-called fact that they won’t have noticed the qualifier. “when you account for the forest and other ecosystems that could be grown on the land used by livestock”. In the leadup to dropping this bombshell, George inserts a qualifier, stating that this figure is true George states that the carbon footprint of 4 kilos of meat is equivalent to a return flight from London to NY. Let’s take a quick tour through the programme to see where George’s facts and figures were less than truthful.Īlarm bells rang for me at about the ten minute mark. Whatever the reason for the choice of title, the misrepresentation didn’t stop there. Or maybe George was just being clever, exploiting the current rage for meat bashing to generate more eyeballs for his programme.
Perhaps he didn’t want to invoke the wrath of all those vegetarians and vegans who’d surely be infuriated by the idea that their diet might not be so virtuous after all. The programme’s subtitle – how meat killed the world – belied the fact that George was actually laying into both animal and non-animal agriculture. The misrepresentation started before we’d even sat down to watch. Unfortunately, it was also rife with factual inaccuracies and misrepresentations that undermine its premise. George Monbiot’s documentary about the end of agriculture, Apocalypse Cow (Channel Four, 8 th January) was certainly entertaining, and gave us plenty to think about.